Content sharing services serve content, such as pictures, videos, text, or combinations thereof, to visitors who access the content sharing service. The content may be sourced from a publisher, automatically generated, or uploaded by one of the visitors to the content sharing service. The content may be represented as digitally encoded information. The content sharing service may store the content, or link to other services and subsequently retrieve the content prior to serving the content to the visitors.
The visitor may employ various techniques to access the content. For example, the visitor may access the content sharing service through a browser. In another example, the visitor may access the content sharing service via an application installed on a mobile device. The visitor may use any sort of device enabled to interact with the content sharing service, such as a personal computer, mobile phone, or an Internet enabled television, for example.
The content sharing service may rank the content based on various heuristics. For example, the content sharing service may employ a ranking based on a count associated with the accessing of a specific content item. The content sharing service may relate the count with the popularity of a specific content item. Thus, a content item that has been accessed one million times may be deemed more popular than a content item that has been accessed one thousand times.
The content sharing service may serve a list of the most popular content items based on the above-described ranking. The list may strategically be embedded with content already being served by the content sharing service.
For example, the list may be presented to a visitor to the content sharing service in response to the visitor indicating a desire to terminate access to the content sharing service (log-off). Due to the fact that the list contains content items that have proven to be successful at captivating other users' interests, the list may be successful at convincing the user to not log-off the content sharing service. In another example, the list may be presented in response to any sort of information identifying the visitor not being available, such as a start page to the content sharing service.
Generally, the list serves to incentivize the content sharing service's user base to maintain access to the content sharing service. By retaining users to view additional content, the content sharing service may monetize the serving of shared content to the users.
The shared content may be served before, during and after the presentation of the content. The shared content may be associated with meta information, and when the shared content is clicked-through by a user, the user may be redirected to additional content associated with the shared content. The shared content may provide information associated with a product or service related to the content.